I recently completed writing the last of my Solar System Planets short story. It like the last but one short story is doing the submission rounds. I hope eventually to place them all in an anthology. The list is below, where published means it has been placed by independent publisher in a magazine. My thanks go to all those publishers who pushed my stories out into the big wide world!

The order of writing (not necessarily editing) has been Mars, Neptune, Earth, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus, Saturn. The order of publication has been Mercury, Neptune, Earth, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, with the last two to be decided.

It is interesting to note that whilst not obvious from the stories themselves, Jupiter’s and Neptune’s are linked into one universe, as are Saturn and Uranus into another one. Jupiter, Uranus and Saturn are all linked to my novel writing:

the first to my C.A.T. series (though it’s not immediately obvious)

the latter two to what I’m calling my Force trilogy.

Yes, I have written more Earth-bound stories than Cold Pressure, all based in Europe… so far, because it’s an area I know. It probably explains why my stories have been published in the UK and not in the USA.

Whilst I feel a sense of achievement, I also am left wondering what I should do next short story writing-wise.

The obvious would be to do the Solar System’s dwarf planets: Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Sedna. It certainly would be a challenge, but at the moment as a theme, it does not call to me.

No I’m looking for what I call a fresh theme in science fiction.

…which leads onto a corollary question… where does hard science fiction get published these days? the obvious markets are:

Analog

Nature Futures

Jupiter

Perihelion

There may be others, but whatever I come up with as a theme, the story line has to fit what they want.

There are magazines that publish a mixture of what I call science fiction and fantasy, but I have noticed that they tend to shy away from what I call deep techie based stories, which is why magazines like Asimov’s and Interzone are not included in the above list.

It’s all been happening in the heavens… there was the spring equinox late Friday (well at least in the UK), the solar eclipse on Friday morning (it seems appropriate that Richard III should be buried shortly after the solar eclipse, given his Queen is said to have died during one)… and for those of you who are interested there’s a science fiction story about an eclipse by Thaddeus White over at Kraxon magazine – see here.

…and now there’s a nova brightening up in Sagittarius!

This is where you can find it in the south eastern skies…

The nova appears to have the classic hydrogen red surrounding a yellowish centre where the explosion took place. For more information check here.

So I’m wondering if there will a short science fiction story about a nova somewhere handy…

The cliff wall broke through the amber dust to almost touch the left side of the dart she was flying in. Claudine shrieked.

The shriek ended with a cough. That turned into more coughs. These changed into retching that continued on and on.

At last, it subsided enough for her to get her breath back and her bleary eyesight to clear. Her faceplate was splattered with a few spots that looked like blood. They were probably some remnants of her breakfast, though she could not remember eating anything that was as dark a red. Out of habit, she touched the spacesuit’s switch to clean the faceplate. Her view dimmed momentarily before she could again see through a clear faceplate.

Claudine slumped back into her seat, but could not relax. If only she could be sure her autopilot had picked out a safe route through this, the worst Mars-wide sandstorm in twenty years, to get her to her patient in time. Marie was already in labour and it was going to be a very complicated birth. It would take all Claudine’s skills to deliver both mother and baby.

There was nothing she could do to speed on her dart. The autopilot was already flying it as fast as safety and engine would allow.

The dustiness vanished from the cracks and crevices in the cliff above her. The dart followed a ledge that hugged the cliff until it narrowed even more to disappear around a sharp spur. She dared not think about what was on the other side. Instead she looked down into the valley onto the tops of the clouds streaking past in various shades of orange. The vortex patterns changed, and changed again. Every bit of dust was different, as if nature’s supreme artist was creating beauty in motion.

Her comms pinged an incoming. It must be Yuri. He would ring her on the slightest whim, bubbling with enthusiasm for whatever had caught his attention, whether it was about his next major engineering task or the prettiness of a flower in a farm tunnel. It had only been three weeks ago when he had walked through the door for his immigrant’s medical, but it felt like a lifetime of laughter. She opened the link.

It was Dr Willox. His grey hair had that harsh steel-wire aura and his lips were grimly pressed together. It must be more trouble for Marie.

“Hello Claudine. I’m afraid your check-up came back with some positives and there’s no way of telling you this gently.” He paused, staring hard at her. “You’ve got T.B.”

Claudine did not want to ask her next question. “Which variant?”

“I’m sorry. It’s Hillier’s.”

It had to be wrong. You caught Hillier’s and you might be dead within five weeks. You were very lucky to last fourteen, if you could call it lucky when you coughed and retched your way to exhaustion and death.

“That’s crazy. I’ve not been in contact-” She coughed. Her throat was sore. She felt drained, just like a person with T.B. Just like…

Her training kicked in. She recognised the classic denial behaviours she had seen in many others and until now, had believed would never go through herself. Stunned at her own stupidity, she shivered despite the warmth of her spacesuit.

The surreal moment passed. She wanted to scream, but sat numb with incredulity at the thought of having caught Hillier’s.

Dr Willox gave a slight nod. “Under the Martian Medical Act as passed by the Council two years ago, you are hereby ordered to Wing J of-”

Claudine cut off the link. She had learned the words by heart and didn’t need to hear the rest.

Wonderful silence. But a silence whispering of desolation and grief. A silence she would have to get used to over her remaining time. She wanted to live. She had so many things she wanted, no, needed to see and do…

Damn it, she would. She still had some time left.

As the dart curved right, she checked out what supplies were stashed on board and how much fuel was left. Almost a full load. She could go anywhere she wanted to for the next three days. The dart turned left round the mountain spur.

A crack sounded. She was jolted sideways and shuddered against her harness. Dust buffeted and rushed past her from a cleft in the cliff down into the valley. The thin walls of her dart reverberated with the dust’s hiss.

The dart swerved to the right and downwards. It scraped against the cliff wall. The dart’s canopy darkened to navy indicating it had been holed. Claudine was jerked forward against her harness, jammed backward against her seat and then slewed to her right, as the dart went into a spin. There was a loud bang and she was jarred against straps.

***

She edged into consciousness, her head feeling fuzzy. Her air was stuffy. She needed oxygen. Despite breathing more quickly, the ache in her chest worsened. Claudine lifted her arm up. Pain shot through her. Gasping, she held her arm mid-air as she let the pain subside. She gingerly continued moving her arm to open her visor.

The air was warm, fresh and sweetly scented. She breathed deeply.

She opened her eyes. Green and yellow specks floated above her. Frightened, she snapped her eyes shut.

The specks disappeared. Her eyes must be all right. She re-opened them. The specks were still there. Her eyes adjusted to a dim greenish light. It had no obvious source.

The ceiling was covered with smooth green inverted domes. So were the gently curved walls and sloping floor. The domes continued into the darkness of tunnel below her.

She coughed. Pain shot through her. She dared not cough again even though her throat prickled badly. Her eyes began to water.

The steely image of Willox saying, ‘Hillier’s’ slipped into her mind. The pain in her throat stopped her from screaming. The silence hit her. Nobody was around. This must be a temporary quarantine place. Only she was still strapped into her dart. But the canopy, that gave vital protection against surface radiation, was missing. There were too many contradictions against common sense, which made her very confused. There was only one way to find out what was what.

Holding each breath as long as she could to fight off triggering more coughing, she undid her safety harness. A pain in her upper left arm jabbed at her. She tried to concentrate on anything but the agony.

The pain worsened. It was all she could focus on. She had to have the painkillers stashed in her medical bag in the dart’s trunk. Slowly, she stood up, opened the dart’s door with her right hand and carefully stepped out. Her foot sank slowly into a dome scrunching down the green material until it became solid. She put her other foot on the floor. There was definitely something hard beneath the green layer, probably real rock. Agony lanced through her arm, making her stagger. She regained her balance and took a step. It was too much. She stood still and time passed. She forced herself to take a step. Then another. And a third.

She found herself leaning against the trunk, which was covered by a dusting of the green material. She had got there. The green lining of the ceiling, walls and floor continued round the back of the dart to form a closed-off space. A trail of dented domes on the floor led up to a flat navy patch in the ceiling.

The trunk was buckled, but the lid had twisted enough to leave an arm-sized hole. Slowly groping inside, she found her bag and pulled out its contents, piece by piece only to discard them on the floor. At last, the drugs box. Sorting through the hypojets, she found the strongest painkiller and triggered the injection into her neck. She slumped. Everything darkened.

***

Claudine opened her eyes onto pure fuzziness. She had to concentrate to get things into focus. A discharged hypojet was in her hand. Why? Something was wrong. Badly wrong. She yawned. The pain was fading. She was so tired. A side effect of the painkiller. She rolled back to lean against the dart’s trunk. What was this place? Her eyelids closed.

***

She woke physically refreshed from a deep sleep, but her mind was fogbound by the painkiller. Motes of green and yellow floated in front of her. The air was scented with vanilla and freesia, a standard air-freshener that hid the city’s stench, but without the undertone of decaying waste. This place must be new. She breathed deeply. Her arm gave her painful reminder. It was probably a hairline fracture. Better get it strapped in.

She was stiff while undressing. Bruises and swellings confirmed that her arm must have taken quite a knock. Searching through the bits and pieces on the floor, she found and gingerly picked up a thin roll. She hooked the bandage end over the top of her arm and rolled it round underneath until she could press it against the loose end. The auto-bandage took over to wrap and tighten itself around her arm. Why was she out of suit? If only her brain would clear. Her stomach rumbled, signalling a deep hunger.

Claudine settled back into the dart and tore off green material to open the emergency rations locker. She glanced at her watch. 1830 hours. No wonder she was ravenous. She switched on a pack of stew to heat it up. Something bothered her, ticking away at the back of her mind. It was something to do with her watch… the date. She had been away from home for two days. Rumbles turned into butterflies as hunger turned into panic.

She checked the dart by rote as if back in her driver training class. Only the emergency life-support systems were working. There was oxygen and water for two days. That was the good news. The bad news was that there was only a day’s supply of food left and the supposedly indestructible rescue beacon was dead.

The memory of her journey through the Martian dust storm with its ensuing nothingness crashed back. Yet now she was breathing air unaided. She must be dead and this was purgatory or hell… or unconscious and hallucinating… or insane while awake.

“Stop this,” she chided herself, looking around for any clue to explain this place. No way could she imagine something as weird as this. This had to be reality.

Claudine stepped out of the dart and panned a torch round. The green material lined everything except that navy patch in the ceiling up slope and possibly the depths of the tunnel she couldn’t see into down slope. She tried for a long time to make out what was beyond the tunnel’s entrance. The specks of light grew denser in her torch’s beam until blocked her view. Whatever they were, they clearly were attracted to light. She wanted to experiment and find out more about them, but the urgent need to survive diverted her attention away from them.

She turned the torch up to the flat patch. It had a familiar sheen, though the colour was a bit odd. If she took into account the green-yellow light from the specks, then it had to be the holed canopy. Whilst one puzzle was solved, another replaced it. Just how did the canopy come to be up there?

She had last seen it on the dart in the dust jet, though she could not remember how it separated away from her. She glanced at the dart’s nose. It was badly compacted. That would have been expected from when the dart hit the valley’s floor after that long fall. The dart must have made a hole through which she fell, somehow shaving off the canopy to let it fall on top of that hole. That made sense as far as it went. And that was not very far.

Being able to breath air comfortably at pressure was inexplicable. The only places it could be done on Mars were in the habitats or vehicles. So this had to be a manmade place. Only it looked too weird for that. And that was without the problem of why the canopy was not being pushed away from the hole. She could well believe rocks and dust lay on top of it to stop it being thrust away. But that did not explain why the air was not rushing out through the inevitable gaps.

It was all just too bizarre. Yet, there had to be an explanation.

Claudine shone her torch on the canopy. The hole it covered was too small. There was no way the dart could have fallen through it. She scratched her head. She flashed her torch over the dart. The green material over the trunk must have grown there while she was unconscious. It could just as easily have grown across the canopy.

She switched off her torch, climbed back into the dart and opened the pack of stew. She took small mouthfuls while contemplating what she could do before her water, if drunk sparingly, would run out in three days.

The dead beacon meant rescue was unlikely. Even if someone searched along the route her autopilot had logged with Argyre city’s computer, they would have the find the canopy under a pile of rocks and have the gumption to rip through it. She would have to get out of this mess on her own. She closed her eyes, trying to quell her nerves.

Time was against her. She had to find a way of getting out of here.

She switched the torch back onto the tunnel’s entrance. Without the green material it would look like a riverbed continuing downwards. There would be no surface exit for many miles, if at all.

That left only one option, climbing through the canopy with a broken arm. It would be a race between it healing and her supplies running out. And her T.B. and the surface radiation without the canopy’s protection complicated the situation further. It was all a matter of timing, getting the balance right.

If only she could only think clearly about it all. That meant waiting for the painkiller’s fug to subside. It certainly was her best, no her only choice.

***

Sixty hours later, she ate the last of her food. Yuri, his love, his laughter, beckoned to her like a guidance beacon. The time she had taken to allow her arm to heal had let her work out what was important to her. It turned out to be Yuri, with the everlasting twinkle in his eyes.

It was not the amazing discovery of this pressurised cave system with its dancing light specks. She had guessed these were a rare form of phosphorescent granules. She waved her hand through them, making them form a swirling pattern.

It was wonderful to have such experiences. It felt even better having coughed so little recently. In fact, she hadn’t coughed at all during the last day. That could not be right. She should be getting worse, not better.

She scrambled through her medical bag for an emergency medi-card. Exposing its needle, she pricked her finger and left it sampling for longer than was necessary. She would have to still wait ten minutes. Meanwhile, she admired the dance of the specks. The green and yellow motes of light jiggled, sometimes bumping into each other, more often changing direction for no apparent reason. She followed one particularly bright yellow speck as it glided, jerked and coiled on its flight down towards the tunnel entrance.

The card pinged. Startled, she fumbled to open it. No sign of Hillier’s. She did not believe it. Willox was never wrong. Yet, she should be short of breath and regularly coughing. Had Willox got the variant of T.B. wrong? She read the card again. There definitely was no sign of T.B. of any variety. She was stunned.

She checked the rest of the card for clues. Her recent history of her immune system had been unusually active trying to beat off infections until shortly after becoming conscious in this cave. It had dropped suddenly, too suddenly. She had had some very serious help. But where from?

Her eyes were drawn to one of the dancing specks. She had to have been breathing these in. Claudine watched her breath as she exhaled. A few lit specks came out of her lungs, but were dimmed. She followed a green one meandering downwards. It touched the floor and sparked back to the strength of the cave’s other green specks. That was no mere chemical reaction. They had to be living organisms…

Impossible.

Yet, the evidence of the medi-card sat solidly in her hand. Hillier’s was gone, with the help of some form of antibiotics. The specks had to be microbes. The green material had to be microbe colonies. Nothing else made sense.

Relief flowed through her. She would live. She could roam Mars freely again. She could go home to Yuri.

If she survived the surface radiation… but she had a plan for that. Happily humming, she gathered her things and climbed up to the canopy.

Her broken arm ached as she reached up to feel around the canopy. The painkillers she had taken were not yet up to strength, but they were dampening the pain. She dared not take any more.

Gently, she peeled away some green material from the canopy. Underneath was a black film. The green material grew back preceded by a brown band and then both encroached further over the canopy. She whistled. The microbes on dying had changed into a brown, then black film when it came into contact with any hint of vacuum. They were the ultimate cause of this pressurised cave.

She tested a bit of black film with her laser knife. It didn’t even leave a scratch. She would have to go through the canopy, its exposed area now being just big enough for her to climb through. There was only one chance before the black film closed her escape route.

Claudine crouched close to the canopy and locked her visor. She had ten hours of fresh suit oxygen to make it back to the city. She took a last glimpse of the dart though a mist of specks. It seemed so far away and forlorn.

Holding the knife’s handle against the canopy, Claudine switched it on. The blade thrust through the canopy. She swept the blade in an arc. Air rushed past her and opened the flap. She hauled her protesting body onto the surface amidst a storm of dust, flakes and small rocks. There was a thump against her leg.

“Hole in right knee,” said the Mars suit. “Ten seconds to patch.” At the same time an overlay appeared on her visor, showing the suit’s lag and the exact position of the hole.

Grabbing a patch hanging from her belt, she bent down to slap it on the hole and stopped. Some of the green microbes had attached itself around the hole forming a black film. It closed the hole.

As she put the patch back onto her belt, an iridescent red, yellow and green fountain emerged from the hole in the canopy. The hole was being closed very fast by a black film. The fountain died.

The canopy’s shreds were nowhere to be seen under the fountain’s debris. Her plan to use the canopy as protection against surface radiation was busted. The only thing to reduce the exposure was walk in the cliff’s shadows. The sooner she got to the protection of a habitat, the better.

She automatically checked her watch to see how much oxygen time she had left. Her watch went out of focus as her breath came into focus. She had exhaled a jet of specks. They could supply some oxygen. As to how long was a pure guess. She had to get a move on, not only to get out of the surface radiation, but also it was only eleven hours to nightfall and its deadly cold.

She turned towards the Sun. The cleft where the dust jet must have forced her off the ledge was a long way up above her. To its left must be the spur she had just travelled round. Claudine turned left to trace the floor of the valley back to home, Yuri and humanity.

***

Her legs ached from the eleven-hour walk. She wanted to stop, sit down and rest. If she did, she knew she would never get up again. She forced her legs to move onward.

Her long shadow dimmed. She turned round towards the Sun. It was dropping below the craggy horizon, throwing off a blue shimmer into the thin atmosphere, lighting up the canyon in a strange light. The canyon’s left wall with all its clefts and cracks, and floor turned into crinkled mauve, while the other wall was light brown. The trail of her footprints in the new sand deposits tracked just beneath the left wall. It was one of those rare moments of beauty and peace.

The Sun’s upper rim fell below the horizon. Stars lit. Green and yellow meteors appeared to streak in random directions across the sky, only they were the specks floating inside her suit. Claudine turned back round and continued her walk using her suit lights to make sure she stayed close to the cliff.

At the end of the canyon, she rounded the corner. About a mile away, hemispherical shadows rose from the ground to cut into the field of stars. Argyre City, her and Yuri’s home. The specks were even brighter against the domes. Claudine kept on walking.

Her route veered towards J-wing, which housed the isolation unit. She didn’t want to go there, but there was no way the city’s system would allow her in anywhere else, not when it would have been told she had Hillier’s.

Claudine glanced at the black patch just above her right knee. They has sealed her suit so fast, they were bound to seal the city’s doors to the surface, imprisoning a whole community. Nobody would be able to escape. Even if they gained freedom from another threat, Hillier’s. She had an awful choice to make, and so little time to make it in. She stood, inwardly shivering.

A needle of yellow light shone up from one of the service domes. A wisp of white frozen air climbed up the light. The light switched off. Those meteor strikes were getting more frequent. Some had said more manmade debris was falling from orbit, others because they were going through an astronomical dust cloud. Whatever the cause, too much vital air was lost.

Even with the microbes, she only had twenty minutes of oxygen left before her carbon dioxide levels would start to rise. She did not know what to do. Head for J-Wing, find a corner to die in or open her faceplate and rip her suit to pieces while she could.

She kept on walking step after aching step. She needed to know the answer to something else.

Claudine opened a voice only comms link to Doctor Willox.

“It’s well after hours-” Willox said, his face showing the deepened lines and bags under the eyes. “Who is this?”

“Did Marie and her son make it all right?”

“Of course they did. Now, who are you?” He gasped. “Claudine?”

Silence.

“Claudine, is that you? Where are you?”

Willox would be worried about her spreading Hillier’s.

“Good to know about Marie. What’s her son called?”

“Denis. Now, where the devil are you? How are you holding up?”

“That’s a lovely name. Is he healthy?”

“He’s already above his birth weight. And I won’t answer another question about them until you tell me where you are.”

“The same old gruff. You’ve not changed.”

“Claudine!” He coughed, almost choking on himself. “Your dart’s oxygen supply ran out twelve hours ago. Where the hell are you? And why haven’t you put this link on visual?”

“I’ve got a bit of a problem.”

“I know.”

“It’s not the problem you think it is.”

“Oh? Since when was having Hillier’s T.B. not a problem?”

“I don’t think I’ll answer that. Is there anyone in J-Wing at the moment?”

Willox hesitated. “There’re four in here including your current boyfriend. You must have caught your T.B. off him. He’s holding up surprisingly well all things considered.”

“Yuri… Not Yuri, please God, no.” An image of his sparkling eyes and crooked grin on his tanned face sprang up in her mind. She tried to imagine him being ill, but could not picture it. Yuri was joy and happiness personified. There was always a spring in his step, wittiness in his jokes, kindness in his actions and above all else, he cared about everything and everyone. He threw an aura of comfort around anyone he met, her most of all. She would be losing that. No, she had already lost that, and more, she had lost his companionship, his understanding of her little mannerisms and his being there, solid and reliable.

Claudine gasped. A whole city would be left to die. Maybe a very few would recover. They could be carriers and wouldn’t be allowed contact with anyone on planet or off. It was they who would be the unlucky ones.

Willox intruded: “Why haven’t you been coughing?”

“Should I be?”

“Most definitely, but I haven’t heard a single ahem, let alone a full-blown raucous cough. Are you using filtering software?”

“What?”

“It’s selling well on the black market. You could have picked up a copy.”

“Why the hell should I waste money on that when you already have diagnosed me with Hillier’s?”

“Good point.” Willox paused. “But how do you explain the lack of coughing?”

Claudine hesitated. Willox would never believe the truth, not without hard evidence.

He coughed several more times.

She looked at him more closely. His skin was unusually white and he was sweating from exertion even though he was only sitting and talking. He had the killer T.B. himself.

She didn’t need to ask where he was. Willox would have isolated himself as soon as he suspected he had the disease, and once Hillier’s was confirmed, would have gone to J-Wing the moment he was sure he would not meet anyone in passing. He had always been harder on himself than on anyone else. “Who’s looking after the city’s medical needs?”

“I am, of… How did you… That was observant of… You must be… Why are you so bloody healthy?”

At last he would believe something very unusual had happened to her. She laughed. “I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your crustiness either.”

He leaned into his screen, eyes very much focused on her even though he could see her on his blanked screen. “I’m going to get even crustier if you don’t answer my question, and for God’s sake take down your privacy mode. It’s not as if I haven’t…”

She switched off her privacy mode.

“… What’s wrong with your suit comms unit?”

“Nothing.”

“The picture I’m getting is sparkling all over.”

“You mean these green and yellow sparks? They’re floating inside my suit and they’re the problem I was talking about earlier.”

He had a bout of coughing before staring back at her. “What happened, Claudine?”

“You’re not going to believe this.”

“Right now I can’t but have to believe you’re alive. So tell me about the rest of your impossibilities.”

She checked her fresh oxygen supply. Ten minutes left. Argyre City’s domes had grown larger, hiding more stars. She could just about make out the green solar-light lines around the airlocks. To the side of the Central dome with all its shops, offices and services was J-Wing. It was much smaller than she remembered. She did not want to go there, to be cramped into a few small rooms with no exit. They would become the only world she could smell or touch. The city, landscape and stars would only ever be seen by proxy through comms, as long as they lasted. It would not be same as experiencing the real thing as she was doing now. This would be the last time she would be roaming free, walking on the Martian dust floor. She wanted to savour the moment, but time was running out.

“I’ve only got ten minutes fresh oxygen left and am about fifteen minutes away from the outside entrance to J-Wing.”

“I’ll get suited up and-”

“No.”

“But-”

“Listen. These sparks are microbes. Yes, real Martian microbes. I don’t know how they killed off my Hillier’s, but they’ve been ruthlessly effective. This cure comes at a price.”

Willox’s faced switched from misery to joy in an instant. “That’s wonderful news. As soon as you get here-”

“Shut up and listen. These microbes are anti-vacuum. One slight crack to vacuum and they’re there, sealing it off.”

“Even better.”

“You don’t get it, do you? They live in self-contained pockets of air with no contact beyond the seal they’ve made for themselves. Anything that’s in with them will stay inside. Once these microbes hit the city, airlocks will be sealed shut permanently. We won’t be able to get out. We’ll be prisoners for life. And death.”

Willox’s smile swung to a silent scream.

She had got through to him.

He had a coughing fit.

She forced herself to take one painful step after another towards the J-Wing airlock.

He looked back up to the screen with tears in his green eyes.

She could not be sure whether they were from the coughing fit or from the misery he must be feeling. Knowing him, he would say it was the former to cover for the latter. She did not bother to ask. Instead she asked: “What do you want me to do?”

Willox hesitated. “I need time to think things through.”

“I haven’t got time.”

“I’m aware of that aspect.” He had reverted to his professionalism he was used to doling out in medical emergencies. “Come to the airlock in J-Wing. We’ll take things from there. I need to organize a few things.” He blanked her off.

An amber light flashed in the corner of her faceplate’s display.

“Warning light acknowledge. Display information.”

The display changed to a message. Her suit’s store of solar energy had fifty minutes left at the current usage before reverting to the standard back-up batteries, which had an hour’s worth of juice. She would be in J-Wing or dead by then. She cleared the display.

She tried to call Yuri on his mobile. She wanted to see him, to see how bad he was. If he’d passed the T.B. onto her, he was likely to be very ill. She wanted to talk to him, tell him how much he meant to her.

No answer. She left him a message to ring back as soon as possible.

She tried contacting Willox.

No reply.

J-Wing’s silence was turning from peaceful via brooding to menacing.

She had nowhere else to go. She forced her legs to move. They were very sluggish. Their pain caused tears to form in her eyes. The door’s green outline became blurred.

A red light flashed in the corner of her faceplate.

She knew what it meant: no oxygen left. It was only a hundred meters to the door. She could make it before the carbon dioxide poisoning did any permanent damage. She cleared her faceplate. The light had given her a new urgency. Desperation let her override her painful protesting legs to march forward.

Gasping, she reached the airlock and pushed the pad to open the outer door.

Nothing happened.

She pulled up the manual override handle.

Still nothing happened. Her chest changed from an unacknowledged tightness to an ache of demanding oxygen.

She was locked out of J-Wing, no the whole city. This was her only route in.

She accessed a link to Willox.

No reply.

She tried Yuri.

No response.

She tried the door comms link.

Silence.

She opened all three channels to her suit comms. “I’m at J-Wing airlock. I can’t get in. Help me.”

Nothing.

“Willox, please,” she whispered. “You’re killing all those who have Hillier’s. Please give,” gasp, “a chance.”

She slid down onto her knees and fell to the ground. “Please…”

***

Claudine opened her eyes; everything was fuzzy. She was shivering from being cold. There was a dull pain across her chest. Her legs were in agony. She tried to stop the shivering. It grew worse. She tried to forget about it.

Stars shone steadily above. An uneven cream stripe was painted across the sky. She could not remember what it was called. Green and yellow meteors streaked in from random directions. Some even changed course abruptly.

Something was wrong. Horribly wrong. Her eyes closed.

***

It was dark when she woke, refreshed from a deep sleep. She was lying on a firm bed with a sheet thrown lightly on top of her. There was a tube stuck into her left hand. A screen to her side threw off a dim light showing her heartbeat, blood pressure, blood sugar levels and breathing rate. They were all normal for someone at rest in the middle of the night.

What was not normal was the occasional yellow or green spot crossing her eyesight. The microbes were still with her. They would always be with her, both her saviour and her curse.

She felt for, found and pressed a switch to raise her into a sitting position. Lights automatically lit. She was in a small room with a shut sliding door a meter beyond the end of her bed. To her right was a standard hospital cabinet for personal things, a high-back chair and beyond them was an open door through which she could see a shower cubicle. It was all standard hospital building and kit. There were no personal possessions, individual decorations or even unique serial numbers to be seen. It was a repeat of things she had seen and dealt with many times before. Only the lack of scuffmarks, tarnishes and scratches identified this as J-Wing.

The after-numbness from her unconsciousness slipped away. She was alive. What was the time? She looked at the screen. It was two-fifteen in the morning. She checked the date. She had been out of it for well over a whole day. So Willox must have relented and hauled her in. He had cut it fine, too damned fine.

A green mote shot across her sight, then a yellow one. How far had these motes spread? If they were in this room, then the ventilation would have made them spread through the rest of J-Wing by now. Had they got to Yuri in time?

She swung her legs over the edge of the bed. They felt stiff and achy. She ignored their protests. Standing up on the cold floor, she switched off the machine reading her vitals and withdrew the tube from her vein with her right hand. Her gown was standard hospital attire, practical but made her look like an old frump. She yanked it off. She pulled the sheet off the bed, folded it in half lengthways and wrapped it around her body like a sarong. It wasn’t perfect, but she felt more human.

Claudine went over to the door and tentatively touched the pad to open it. To her surprise, it slid across to let her out into a square reception area. The night lighting let her see the doors to the other four care rooms were shut. Yuri had to be behind one of these doors.

The board behind the reception desk hadn’t been filled in. She stepped behind the desk and stopped. A plant pot with a small tree blocked her access to the desk’s computer. That unhygienic thing shouldn’t be in this hospital. Instinct made her pick it up and carry it into the corridor leading away from the reception. The automatic door slid open. The corridor was stacked with boxes, on top of which stood trays of plants. There was only enough room for one person to sidle past all this and there was no room for the tree she was holding.

“You might as well put it back,” Willox said quietly behind her.

She turned round. He was standing in the opened doorway of the room nearest to her. His eyes still had bags underneath them, but his skin was pinker and there were fewer lines on his face. He was recovering from his T.B. “Where’s Yuri?”

“We’re cut off from the city while we work out exactly what these microbes of yours do. What do you think we’re going to survive on? It’s all right water and air being pumped in. But we needed food, replacement parts and research kit. We had to lug all of them in before we brought you through the outside airlock and blew our internal airlock to the city.”

“Oh.” She needed time to absorb this and work out what it all meant for the future, hers and Yuri’s.

“Go and get some more sleep. You’ll see Yuri in the morning at breakfast.”

“I hate it when you’re always right.”

“I know. It’s one of my less endearing traits, which I reserve only for emergencies I hasten to add. Goodnight.” He stepped back into his room. “By the way, you’re the talk of Solar System, proving that life started on here on Mars.”

“What?”

“Well, how else could they have had even a chance of curing your T.B.?”

Her head went into a spin. She could not take what he had said.

“Pleasant dreams,” he said, closing the door between them.

She was faced with the frustration of waiting for more answers. Willox would drive her up the wall and he certainly would was a good candidate for being murdered.

“What’s all the noise about?” Yuri asked.

“Yuri,” she spun round, ran towards him and embraced him.

“Hello, Angel,” he said holding her close to him.

He was warm, smelled clean with an overtone of cooled sweat and his muscles were as hard as ever. At last she pushed him away to look into his face. His crooked grin and sparkling blue eyes shone more brightly against his drained tan. His short blond hair acted as a halo around his face. He turned his face away and coughed before returning his gaze to her.

“Come on, back to bed with you.”

“Yes, nurse,” he said as his grin became even more crooked. “Only if you promise to tell me a bedtime story about your adventures.”

“There’s not that much to tell.”

“You go out in the middle of a sandstorm and come back with Martian life that cures a deadly disease, and you say there’s not much to tell. Please, for me.” His lips pouted like a child’s and his eyes took on a pleading look.

“Oh, all right. But only one story.”

He pulled her towards him and gave her a lingering kiss.

She could not resist and closing her eyes, immersed herself in the pleasure of his succulent lips.

He broke off for another cough.

When he’d finished, she turned him round and gently guided him into his room. “Bed for you. Now.”

Claudine tucked him into his bed and sat on the armchair facing him. She told him her tale. Instead of him falling to sleep, his face grew more and more animated with astonishment. She stopped at the description of the blue sunset. “I’ll never forget it. I’ll never see anything like it again, not being stuck here in this prison.”

“How can you say that when we’re confined to this wing? We’re stuck here forever, until the day we die.”

“No,” he said shaking his head. “You think only of medicine and how to make people well. It’s a lovely thing to do and you are a wonderful person to do it. You must feel very happy to have found that Hillier’s and, perhaps other killer types of T.B., can be cured. I can understand you not liking us being trapped in here. But it will pass. We’re survivors, just like those microbes of yours. They had to adapt, change to survive in a dying world. They had to become what they are now.”

“Yes, but they’re our gaolers now.”

He pulled his hand out from under his sheet and told hold of hers, squeezing it gently. “Please, Claudine, see it my way for a few moments. These microbes have a lot to teach us. They survived by changing to what they had to. So can we. That’s not all. We can do things with them, things we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.”

“Yuri, you’re the eternal optimist and I love you for it. It’s time you got some of that precious sleep,” she said getting up.

Instead of letting go, his hand gripped hers more tightly. “Look, to be an engineer you have to work out how to use things in new ways. For that you need a good imagination. And my imagination tells me we can use the microbes to repair holes in our domes, to shield spacecraft against dust as they fly faster, build the hulls of generation ships for the stars and that’s only the start. One day, I don’t know when, we will find a way of stopping these microbes locking us in.”

“They’re dreams and that’s all they are.”

“They’ve not, Angel. I’m an engineer. It’s always been my job to work out what controls to put on things to turn dreams into reality. These microbes are something new. They just need controlling in the right way. Our children, and if not them, our grandchildren will be able to do things with them we would consider magic today. It’s always been like that and it always will be.”

He was so earnest that she could do nothing other than believe him. A flicker of hope of an escape from J-Wing and for an interesting future stirred in her heart.

I’m rather pleased for my fellow MA Creative Writing student, Clare Donoghue. She had her second book out in her DI Lockyer series on Thursday and is already attracting marvellous reviews. See here.

The fact that the second in her series is getting such reviews says a lot! This is definitely a series in police procedurals that needs to be watched. (Fingers crossed that she will eventually get a TV series or film out of this.)

Congratulations Clare.

This kind of good news spurs me on to complete my own science fiction novel rewrite… all I’m going to say is that the rewrite so far is a heck of a lot better than the original…

Well, with yet another announcement today, I’m beginning to think almost everywhere. But this is too glib an answer. Let’s put some reality into the answer to this question.

As noted in my previous post, we’ve assumed for a long time that life requires oxygen. But there’s been the recent suggestion that life could exist in methane seas of Titan. See my previous post on this subject.

There have been suggestions that subsurface oceans on icy moons could harbour basic forms of life. Two moons known to have such oceans are Europa (Jovian system) and Enceladus (Saturnian system). The recent buzz in the news is it’s been proved that Enceladus has hydrothermal activity. See here for details. It’s one step closer to proving the existence of life.

Moons that have clear evidence of cryo-volcanism in the past, but no obvious signs of it now, are:

Ariel (Uranus system)

Miranda (Uranus system)

These may still harbour small pockets of subsurface water where life could exist.

But cryo-volcanism does not have to be the only mechanism to sustain life.

The planet Venus used to have a more friendly atmosphere until it got overheated. Even so, there is a shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet that is very similar to our own here on Earth. Could life somehow have learned to float in this atmosphere, much like fish on out sea? Of course it would have to be microbial and nothing complex.

Then there’s Mars. The recent confirmation that there is water, albeit now locked in as ice, suggests life might have had a chance to develop when it was warmer. You would think it could no longer exist, but I’m far from sure. See my story: A Fate of Dust for the how and why it could still exist in small pockets there.

And before I forget the dwarf planet Ceres in the asteroid belt which may still have a subsurface layer of water, kept liquid due to the pressure it is under. See here for details. Maybe the Dawn probe will give us more insight on this situation soon!

All in all, these data should be combined to be the basis of an easy approximate formula to identify when and where life could exist. This could be based on the amount of tidal heating or eccentricity of the orbit, density of the body and maybe some other key parameters.

It would certainly help science fiction writers to design their solar systems of the fictional futures.

Yesterday was International Women’s Day. There were all sorts of events to mark the day. But in one way, it saddens me to think we need such a day, because it means that there is discrimination against women.

This discrimination can take various forms, some of them utterly horrific. It is right that the more dire should hit the headline news. But these are supported and encouraged by the little ways in which women are belittled. One such is the way they are treated in the science fiction writing and publishing community.

Let me make this clear. A lot of people in this community treat women and men equally. It is the minority that don’t, but it is enough of a minority that makes a difference: women get less pay for the same amount of work; women are persuaded to hide their identity behind a nom de plume that is either neutral in gender or worse, male, in order to increase their pay and market presence; and women do not get anywhere near the fair share of awards given the proportion of literature that is published.

Steps have been taken in recent years to highlight this issue and some redress has happened to give women more equal opportunities. But it has not gone far enough in the right direction. In my view, this redress should not have been needed in the first place.

Worse, the lack of women writers in science fiction is clouding and detracting from what is excellence in the genre. Yes, science fiction is suffering from this issue. It is being constrained, held back and stopped from being something better.

What is better, you may well ask? That extra richness in both breadth and depth.

The sooner the discriminators realise they are shooting themselves in the foot by their actions and stop doing so, the better it will be for the whole of science fiction. Simples!

The science keeps on rolling in at an incredible speed. The most interesting from my point of view as a science fiction writer is that Titan (the largest moon around Saturn) could harbour methane-based oxygen free life. See here for details.

This particular life can only really start out in liquid methane, which are what the seas on Titan comprise. So we would not expect to find life developing from the gaseous methane here on Earth.

But science fiction-wise, can you imagine two different races in the Solar System? So different that there won’t be any wars for resources? Think about all the other planets being discovered around nearby Stars. What happens if the methane-based life was the more predominant? Could we be the odd life-forms out? Or could we be looking at a kind of methane-based fish or dolphin? There are so many possibilities.

But what science fiction does is look at how things, aliens, whatever interact with people. Yes, there are exceptions, but that is exactly what they are – exceptions. Well, that is until about five years from now, when the science fiction publication industry will have caught up the science – after all, it takes time to write a novel, then time to edit it, then time to get the marketing plans in place, then time to print it and distribute it to the points of sale…

Short stories are another matter entirely. It can take as little as a few days from the writer typing in the final word on the story to in being on the internet at a well-know science fiction publishers.

Other interesting science includes the wave-particle duality of light being better understood – see here.

Then there’s all that water on Mars (yes I do mean that red planet). See here.

Yep… I can see the science fiction short story market having a field day with all these discoveries… I really don’t know how the novel publishers are going to cope under these circumstances.